Christopher Hitchens was momentarily agog on a recent visit to Cuba, where he learned of ailing former president Fidel Castro‘s desire to build a Russian Orthodox Church in Havana, even though no one in Cuba practices Russian Orthodoxy — until he remembered (aha!) that Fidel has never been one to walk too far from the Moscow party line (which has become increasingly influenced by said church in the era of Vladimir Putin); meanwhile, STOP SMILING contributor Jon Fasman is traveling the US on a book tour in support of his new novel, The Unpossessed City, in which the protagonist has his own unnerving traipse through Moscow.